Mary replied that the marriage was postponed indefinitely, whereupon the girls exchanged meaning glances and passed on.  In less than twenty-four hours, half of Ella’s acquaintances were talking of her discarding Henry on account of his father’s failure, and saying “that they expected it, ’twas like her.”

Erelong the report, in the shape of a condolence, reached Henry, who caring but little what reason was assigned for the broken engagement, so that he got well out of it assumed a much injured air, but said “he reckoned he should manage to survive;” then pulling his sharp-pointed collar up another story, and brushing his pet mustache, wherein lay most of his mind, he walked up street, and ringing at Mrs. Russell’s door, asked for Miss Herndon, who vain as beautiful, suffered his attentions, not because she liked him in the least, but because she was fond of flattery, and there was something exceedingly gratifying in the fact that at the North, where she fancied the gentlemen to be icicles, she had so soon made a conquest.  It mattered not that Mrs. Russell told her his vows were plighted to another.  She cared nothing for that.  Her life had been one long series of conquests, until now at twenty-five there was not in the whole world a more finished or heartless coquette than Evren Herndon.

Days passed on, and at last rumors reached Ella, that Henry was constant in his attendance upon the proud southern beauty, whose fortune was valued by hundreds of thousands.  At first she refused to believe it, but when Mary and Jenny both assured her it was true, and when she her self had ocular demonstration of the fact, she gave way to one long fit of weeping; and then, drying her eyes, declared that Henry Lincoln should see “that she would not die for him.”

Still a minute observer could easily have seen that her gayety was feigned, for she had loved Henry Lincoln as sincerely as she was capable of loving, and not even George Moreland, who treated her with his old boyish familiarity could make her for a moment forget one who now passed her coldly by, or listened passively while the sarcastic Evren Herndon likened her to a waxen image, fit only for a glass case!

CHAPTER XXXI.

A QUESTION

Towards the last of April, Mrs. Mason and Mary returned to their old home in the country.  On Ella’s account, Mrs. Campbell had decided to remain in the city during a part of the summer, and she labored hard to keep Mary also, offering as a last inducement to give Mrs. Mason a home too.  But Mrs. Mason preferred her own house in Chicopee, and thither Mary accompanied her, promising, however, to spend the next winter with her aunt, who wept at parting with her more than she would probably have done had it been Ella.

Mary had partially engaged to teach the school in Rice Corner, but George, assuming a kind of authority over her, declared she should not.